PediaPress is a project that allows you to turn Wikipedia pages into actual books. They have an open-source MediaWiki extension, so you can run this on your own wiki. The coolest thing is that they’re going to be integrated into official Wikipedia wiki’s, so the whole world will be able to get their paper Wikipedia quickly and cheaply. Kudos go to Heiko and Johannes for getting this far with it.

UniWiki is a set of usability extensions for MediaWiki, developed by Unicef. They’re using wiki’s in 3rd world countries to help spread knowledge and to allow collaboration between schools from all over the world. They’ve done some impressive testing and improvement, so these extensions are something you should consider for your MediaWiki. The only problem right now is that they’re actually very hard to find. I’ll try to get a better idea how to get this working and post a follow-up blog post on this subject.

Wikia Search data dumps. While we’ve all tried the Wikia search, it’s not so well known fact that they have database dumps of everything. This should make some interesting research possible.Â Incidentally, this is exactly what Franklin st. statement proposes.

OLPC in Europe. There were some rumors that this Christmas they’re going to repeat funding drive that they had last year in USA. It’s not going to be limited only to USA, so we’ll be able to get them on this side of the pond.

FLOSS Manuals is a project that’s creating Free Manuals for Free Software. The idea is to create communities around different software projects that then work together to write really great manuals. Some of them are also available as printed versions.

Kaltura – Open Source video editing platform. Idea here is to be able to edit a video, just like a wiki. They have their own Flash player and can fully attach to MediaWiki pages.

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General impressions

Overall it was a great conference. For some reason I’ve felt a bit of disconnect with localÂ attendeesÂ but that is probably my own fault. Conference organizers did anÂ incrediblyÂ good job with the whole organization. The only wish I would have for the next time is to make sure there is water available at the venue. It was a bit strange to only have some coffee and tea available, but it was easy enough to find a near street-corner vendor with water.Â

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What I learned about future of Wikipedia and WikimediaÂ foundation

I learned that they are working very hard. But it’s a really young organization that’s only starting to grow. So for now it seems that their goals for next year is to just make the whole operations as stable as possible that will allow them for further growth and bigger projects.

Having better search, WYSIWYG editor, better uploads and more projects is on their TODO list, but to be able to achieve that they have to make sure their infrastructure (both technical and real-world) is working well enough. I can fully respect that.

There was also some buzz on finally getting tagged revisions in. This will allow to create non-vandalized snapshots of pages through time (or at least that is my envisioning of usage).

Project relationships – all the communities need to work together; some local wikipedias are already requiring people to upload to commons directly

Partnerships – itâ€™s hard to make good connections with institutions on volunteer base

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Wikimedia Commons, readersâ€™ view / Censorship

Top views show pictures related to sexuality. There is currently a proposal in working that require files to be realistically useful. The problem is that the project doesnâ€™t want to be historically short-sighted.

Origins started in an email chain message. Calling for a sit-in demonstration, positive demonstrations. Wiki of a famous blogger hosted the content and it was increased and more detailed crosspostings.

Wikipedia is far more detailed and complete than the largest specialist health wikis. So health is not really working on separe wikiâ€™s. One of the reasons for this could be that itâ€™s a encyclpedia topic and encourage in Wikipedia.

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Gaming content

The content is reguraly delted from Wikipedia. Doesnâ€™t fit the â€œtextbookâ€ model. Itâ€™s often seen as trivial or non-important.

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Wikibooks also has policy itâ€™s not for for video game strategy guides.

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Topics deemed â€œunenycyclopedicâ€ can thrive on their own. The 3 top gaming wikis have more articles then all the health wikiâ€™s combined.

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Comics and Wikipedia

Controversy led to creation of Comixpedia

Still many comic-related deletions

Growing number of independent comics wikis

Marvel Database has 26,000 articles.

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Recipes

In 2004 lots of recipes got deleted from Wikipedia. Wikipedia asks people to add recipes to Wikibooks Cookbooks, but itâ€™s often not well received. You canâ€™t add variations of recipes and such.

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Wikipedia and social networking

People tried playing chess on Wikipedia, or do social networks. All of these things were deleted.

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Wikia builds into software itself tools that allow such operations.

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What is needed regarding deletion:

Better workflow for information initially in the wrong place

Easier ways to find the correct place

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WikiRecycle

A bot takes articles thar are listed for non-speedy deletion

Archives them where they can be reused by other wikis, with full attribution.

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What is needed

Links between projects:

Part of interface

Automated

Appealing

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This also works for languages. Itâ€™s also possible to do Geo-location so Wikipedia could suggest right place.

Designing a search editing process that itâ€™s Wiki like. Itâ€™s a very different thing in a search context. Itâ€™s about links, much more granular piece of information. People really like debating and discussing things, and not add links without lots of social context.

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Wikia Search itâ€™s whitelisting pages that are community related.

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When you search, you get different options next to search results. You can edit, annotate, spotlight, delete. Thereâ€™s a full transparency of who changed what etc.

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Theyâ€™re trying â€œFacebook styleâ€ profile pages.Â

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Search roadmap

Wikia expecst it to be at least 1.5 years before we will be fully competitive

First start with a synthesis article.Â You gather multiple independent sources and read them, then use this to write the story in your own words. Itâ€™s important to attributes quotes and claims to relevant sources.

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Wikinews allows and encourage original reporting. This is fundamentally different from the way Wikipedia works. Thereâ€™s an accreditation process.

The Wikimedia foundation has legal issues with giving out press credentials. So theyâ€™re working on a new organization to solve this problem. Theyâ€™re hoping to have this launched for end of summer 2008.

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Wikinews also have RSS feeds. This allows you to get news â€œas it happensâ€ into your feed reader. Theyâ€™re expanding this with categorization, so youâ€™ll be able to subscribe to only certain categories.

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News-edition weekly, is a printed weekly project done in a newspaper style. Depending upon communities support for project should be available in a few months.

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There is also large interest in audio-news briefly, done in a podcast format.